“Basically, there are two ways to build an organization,” a
former Facebook employee explains. “You can be really, really
good at hiring, or you can be really, really good at firing.”
Zuckerberg has been really good at firing. “We made some hires
that weren’t the right ones. And we were pretty good at
correcting that quickly. Mark deserves the credit for identifying
and following through with that.” In other cases, key personnel
who were good fits simply got outgrown by the company. It can be
even harder to jettison those kinds of employees, whose
contributions have earned them the loyalty of business partners
and colleagues. But here too Zuckerberg did not flinch.

Sean Parker, for example, joined Facebook
in the summer of 2004 as the company’s first president. He kept
Facebook on track when Zuckerberg’s attention wandered to Wirehog
and helped raise the company’s first rounds of outside capital.
Most crucially, he did something that will allow Zuckerberg to
maintain almost complete control over Facebook for as long as he
wants to control it.

Parker, who’d been ousted from both Napster and a later startup, a digital Rolodex
service called Plaxo, became obsessed with making sure Zuckerberg
didn’t suffer the same fate. In conjunction with raising $500,000
from Thiel, Parker helped restructure Facebook’s voting stock.
Zuckerberg today holds 57 percent of those shares, which means
that no one, including Facebook’s board members, can legally
force him to do anything. This level of control in the hands of
one shareholder is extraordinary, and it’s already raising
hackles on Wall Street. But it was crucial to getting Zuckerberg
comfortable with taking Facebook public, because it means he
won’t be compelled to take shortcuts to appease impatient
shareholders.

For all Parker brought to Facebook, though, his party-boy ways
were deemed too great a liability for him to have a future at the
company. Within a year of Parker’s joining the company, he was
forced out.

Parker’s departure made room for Owen van Natta, a former
Amazon executive hired as head of business
development and then promoted to chief operating officer. The
36-year-old Van Natta was Facebook’s first real adult
supervision. There were 26 employees when he joined, only two of
whom were over 30 years old. During his tenure the staff grew to
hundreds, and he had helped hire a lot of them.

Van Natta also got Facebook’s business engine running, assembling
its first sales and finance teams and negotiating an investment
from Microsoft in 2007 that valued the company at
$15 billion. Revenue increased from less than $1 million to more
than $150 million. At heart, though, Van Natta was a start-up
guy. He thrived on the loosely organized chaos of a young company
growing at hyperspeed. His greatest strength was deal-making, not
management. In early 2008, in the wake of the disastrous launch
of an advertising product called Beacon, Facebook’s senior team
determined that the company needed a different kind of executive
running the business. So Zuckerberg let Van Natta go.

WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg Proved He Can Build A
Startup, But Can He Lead A Publicly Traded Company?